This conference is multidisciplinary and will explore recent developments in the fields of transcriptional regulation, genomics and proteomics. The conference is designed to critically assess the strengths and weaknesses of current approaches and how the information generated by these efforts can be optimally combined to develop a rigorous and comprehensive view of the mechanisms underlying normal and aberrant gene regulation. Conference speakers have been selected to represent diverse points of view on community research objectives, high-throughput technologies and appropriate computational methods. Special care has been used to select leading speakers from the diverse disciplines that are required to make rapid research progress in transcriptional regulation, genomics, proteomics and systems biology. We expect a lively interdisciplinary dialog will result and the conference will yield new insights and catalyze new collaborations in this developing and important area. Consequently, this meeting should be uniquely important for graduate students, postdocs and other researchers who future careers will involve these interdisciplinary efforts.